Of course, one of the good things about being on the other side of the planet is that sometimes I can pick Mom up and put her on top with a nice cup of tea and some home made cakes while YOU guys are asleep. I was foiled this time because Mudcat went down just as I was about to post two hours ago, and now Amos has done the job for me. Oh well, the best laid plans......

And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with lemonade. It's just that some moments are "cup of tea" moments, and this is one of them - even more so now than two hours ago.

By the way, we have a very good imitation blunderbuss here that John made for his pirate show. It looks pretty convincing, but it's perfectly harmless - it shoots party poppers - all you get is a nice bang and a bunch of little streamers. Might have been just the thing for a virtual duel - if one had happened.

Rapaire, this retroactive warping of historical fact is just silly. It's one thing for Big Brother to do it, but you are not Big Brother. The record clearly shows I have posted here continuously while LH lapsed. Why? Obviously, because of his temporary condition of complete decimation. You are being illogical.

Pfui! Amos chose, instead of utilizing the grand opportunities here for the sort of wit and ridiculosity that the situation clearly called for, to get all huffy and affronted....like a maiden aunt who has just detected a lapse of teatime etiquette on the part of a younger relative. He rushes to the defense of a thread which from its inception has been based on bizarre humour and utter nonsense, and acts as if he were defending the dignity and sanctity of some hallowed institution. He objects strenuously to my trolling for a response on the sacred ground of the Mother of All BS (ahem...bullshit) Threads.........

How absurd. Has the man lost his sense of proportion altogether? Has he been consuming too many pickled anchovies? Something is seriously wrong here.

If he were living in Schenectady....if he was a Schenectadonian or whatever the hell they call themselves....I could understand it. But he's living in California. Californians are supposed to be broadminded and flexible.

Or is all his huffing and puffing merely feigned outrage? I suspect that is the case. It's just a big act. Well, I am not impressed. And I am fully prepared to resume the duel at any time in order to put this pompous fellow in his proper place. Out of politeness, I will not state where that place is....

Oh, bloviate away, Leedle Hack, your smoke screen will never be thick enough to obscure the truth. You insulted Mom and all who abide with her. Then you show up and insist you were just kidding. For fie. Puff away, cover your scrawny butt as you will, but I assure you all would be put much more right by a simple admission and apology.

Just to make the record clear, the sordid calumny for whcih Little Hawk was so recently vaporized and emulsified is the following remark on the innate character of our Mom:

As for the MOAB, forget it. No one is insane enough to try and analyze that. It has become a tiny club for the terminally verbose and Shatnerless types who lurk at the fringes of society, desperately hoping against hope that something they say or do actually matters.

The reason this was grounds for a challenge is it is false slander against all of our natures. If I hoped for a minute to make something I say "really matter", Little Hawk, are you really deluded enough to think I would put it on the MOAB?

This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember'd; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

So hold thine own, Monsieur Hack, and find some use therefore better than such craven sprinkles.

More bloated verbosity from the supposedly outraged one! Good gracious. My dear fellow, anyone who uses the term "bloviate" in common discourse nowadays is clearly suffering from an ailment that I would characterize as terminal pomposity of the piehole. "Bloviate" indeed! No one bloviates anymore in this society. People bloviated in the Victorian era, Amos, but bloviation has had its day.

You need to descend from the exquisitely remote ivory tower of pretence and intellectual artifice you have constructed for yourself, shake yourself off like a hounddog after a refreshing dip in the river, and join the rest of us down here on planet Earth.

I stand by my original statement. I am proud of it. I would say it again if asked to. It was a red flag waved in the breeze in hopes of stimulating a shocked snort of surprise from the wandering MOAB bull, and it succeeded splendidly. Mission accomplished.

By the way, if you wish me to continue responding in a timely fashion to each and every ONE of your ramblings on this thread, I shall expect a weekly stipend (say $150) to be deposited directly into my Paypal account. Otherwise I shall only respond when I feel like it. My time is valuable, you know... ;-)

Mwahahahaha. What pretense!! What folderolity. Bloviate is a perfectly fine word, the more so because it describes you to a T, M. Hack.

As for paying you for appearing here, I think not. I would remind you that it is only through goodwill that your status here as existing whatsoever was recently restored. You should pay Mom for the privilege of occasionally appearing under her overly-lenient roof. Pray, do not bore me with your fancied fraudulent justifications any longer. They are not the class of BS we seek in these parts.

I spit ice cubes and seeds in your general direction. And slip an ice cube into your odiferous underpants.

The word is "odoriferous", you simpleton. And did you know this? It means "diffusing an odor, either pleasant or obnoxious".

Since you obviously meant the former (pleasant), I suppose I should thank you for the compliment, although I have to say that I find it rather odd that you would take such an interest in another man's skivvies...you being happily married and all...

I did mean odoriferous--meaning, morally offensive; as in, "odoriferous legislation". Your delusory world-view was not up to extrapolating that fairly obvious meaning, but perhaps I should not have committed the typo. I know you are in a delicate frame of mind, having jsut been reassembled from small parts. Sigh. Never mind. When the healing process is over, I am sure you will be much more rational.

Oh stop your nonsense, good Rapaire. It is more than I can bear to have TWO of you go completely around the bend at once.

Little Hawk has become a rude beast, slouching toward Bethlehem to be re-assembled, and you are acting like a hant with more of his attention on the far side than the near one. This is a ridiculous universe, no mistake.

"Hey, look at the blimp!" she exclaimed, pointing at the sky behind them.

The men turned as one, their eyes following the line of her finger. In the brief second it took for them to realize they had been fooled, the women darted in, grabbed Mom, and ran. Under the cover of the men's loud declaiming and chest thumping, Jenny O had quietly brought the horses up and had been holding them, obscured from general notice, in a copse of trees about 20 yards from the field of dishonor. She broke from the trees, leading the other horses behind her. Her cohorts scrambled quickly onto their mounts and tore away. SRS had to delay. She was holding Mom. Jenny deftly leaned down as she rode past and swept Mom onto the saddle behind her. SRS took off running again. With a wild whoop and a great leap, she sprang over the hindquarters of her steed, and raced away after the others. They were headed for the Outback.

Ho! Ho! (snort) Well, this has been most entertaining. It's been almost as much fun as the time I got invited to one of Bill Shatner's barbecues at the place in Tennessee. It seems that he had hooked up with a traveling women's volleyball team that he met while doing a Star Trek convention in Memphis, and he invited them all back to his place for steaks and corn on the cob. I was there doing research for the WSSBA, Bill being kind enough to help out by providing all kinds of background information and anecdotes. Things really got going after sundown, I can tell you. The food was great and the entertainment....even better.

Yesiree. Too bad you couldn't have been there, Rapaire. Chongo has been kicking himself that he missed out on that one.

I'm really enjoying my tour of the Australian Outback. We visitedthis place today. I was careful to write down directions in case you might like to visit it yourself some day. Look out for your brothers while I am gone.

Here we are at the cocktail hour near Alice Station. You can tell from the lighting that it is a wee bit early,but we needed Mom to snap the picture while she could still hold the camera. Happy hour just started and she has already downed 3 highballs.

I am glad you have a chance to take a vacation, but don't expect the place to be ttidy when you get back.

I got an offer to go to sea as a common deckie hauling cargo out to Singapore from Frisco, today. I am thinking hard about it. Maybe we will cross trails on your way back from Australia, especially if you come back by horseback as well.

Oh, gawd, you should feel what it feels like to ride on a horse all day in a dress. . . I'm walking home. . . once I can walk again. . . good thing we've done a big loop. . . we're not that far from the house. . . Mom says she's going to wait for something large and comfortable--I think there might be a flatbed truck with hay in the back coming through soon.

MMario, I hate to tell you, but I think you'll find it's only a palindromic number. The middle number is not the same upside down, so not a pinwheel. Close though, and quite nice in its own way.

It was a rough ride I agree, Stilly, still once one has had a few of those highballs, one is sorta feeling no pain - you know how it is. When cocktail hour was eventually over, we settled MOM down in one of these. She was feeling no pain either. We actually had a considerable amount of trouble finding a haystack WITHOUT a needle in it. The nasty little things are turning up everywhere!

Hey, lookat me! A passing peddler was leading his pet ostrich and I hopped a ride back to the house. Quite a soft ride!

While folks are milling around I'm going to make some more sun tea. I think the batch in Mom's fridge now has mold floating in it. Not a good sign. You all just have a seat on the porch, or go play horseshoes down in the bottom of the yard, it's shady enough down there. (And take the shoes off of the horses before you throw them, please!)

By the way -- we did meet up with Peace. He's a swell guy. Easily two and a half meters tall when we met him*, he was writing a new song with his left hand, chording it out on the guitar with his right, and picking his teeth with a full-grown Lodgepole Pine. His favorite tipple is tea, gasoline, and gunpowder and he owns a pair of blue oxen. He also is on the local volunteer fire department and uses Gulliver's method of extinguishing fires no matter their size or extent. Every day he eats a herd of forty cows (cooked, of course) for breakfast, accompanied by three hundred and sixty-two scrambled eggs, ninety-seven gallons of industrial-strength tea, and a boxcarload of potatoes. For lunch and dinner he needs more food. He shaves by driving his whiskers in with a hammer and cutting them off inside with a double-bitted axe (saves time, he says, because all he has to do is insert it, twirl it, and spit it all out). Of course, this ruins the axehead but Parks Canada Parcs supplies him all he needs as a reward for pushing up and installing the bracing under Mt. Robson when it started to sag a few years back.

I think Rapaire has been a little to close to some of the forest fires up north burning out of control (and right across someone's patch of maryjane). Or maybe he's trying in his own unique way to tell us that he has developed a bunionBunyan.

The biscuits are cookies - sweet. That was why I had doubts about Amos putting peanut butter on them. But anchovies and onion, or pickled herring? Definitely not! I think you'd like these ones plain, MMario.

I was forgetting you folks call them cookies over there. We Oz folks are more likely to call them biscuits - or bikkies. On the odd occasion we might call some of the round ones cookies.

I'm trying to imagine something between a crumpet and a scone, and nothing comes to mind at all. I think the savoury ones you want for your anchovies and herrings etc would be crackers, MMario.

Here's some tea you can cool down if you want it that way, SRS. I would too if it was summer - it's a great refreshing drink. I'm having mine hot cos It's a cold night here. Congratulations on your weight loss too! I need to do that, but it's hard to get started.

These sound really unfamiliar. Maybe we don't have things like that at all here.

Oops! I just remembered - I left MOM sleeping on a haystack somewhere out near Alice Springs. It's a good thing she was in the shade! She should be waking up soon, so I'd better take some paracetamol and some of that iced tea with me, cos when she does wake up she's probably going to have The Mother of all Hangovers!